I spent all day yesterday coding the day/night cycle + seasons (It’s integral to pretty much everything in a Harvest Moon game) and it was so much fun! Currently I’m coding the farming system and I’m almost done with it, haven’t hit a major speed bump yet which is great!

Here is a video clip demonstrating what’s done so far here

And yes the sprites/tiles are stolen from Harvest Moon for the time being, don’t worry they are only placeholder

play it here

same controls as before except you can build blocks by pressing ‘X’

I’m having lots of fun making this one, coding is pretty straightforward and fun (at the moment atleast) spriting is a lot of fun and I’m even enjoying playtesting the game (Even though it’s very barebones right now )

Things to add on top of my head include:

• HUD (score display, time etc)
• Obstacles (blocks that break if you stand on them for more than 1 second, wall turrets that stun)
• Level features (randomly generate rooms and stuff like that)

I also got bored with coding Sol.. as usual so I’m gonna take a break for a while and next time I start making a game I will keep it simple and actually get it finished (probably going to be a puzzle game or something) before I get back to the shmup. I’m probably going to take a break until the next Something Awful Game Dev competition because I’ve been following the earlier ones and it sounds like fun!

Difference between unfocused and focused

I made the focus button also focus the fire, so when you hold shift the cone of fire gets smaller which make it more effective against single foes (This is borrowed/stolen from Touhou), oh and speaking of new features if you go to the top of the screen all pickups will automatically be dragged toyou as if they are inside the graze circle (This is ALSO from Touhou). I’m starting to feel that all the core mechanics are in place and I’m going to start working on new enemies next; and to test out the enemies I’m going to make a simple survival mode where you meet enemies in a random order until you die.

Build 9 can be found here!

If you hold shift now, in addition of focusing your movement and seeing your hitbox, you now also see you’re graze hitbox. Bullets passing through the graze circle gives you X points (exact number to be decided later) and the ship will drag in items touching the circle, making pickups easier.

The combo system allows you to chain in lots of kills for bonus points, for each enemy you kill the combo countdown resets to 1.5 seconds, so keep killing enemies to keep the combo going! At the moment the scoring works like this: X + (combo*3) where X is the point value for the enemy (In this case 100). So if you have a 75 combo (Which is going to be pretty hard to get once the stage layout and the enemy placement is finalized)  and kill an enemy you will get  225 extra points for him, I’m probably going to change this number a lot  when I start tweaking the mechanics later.

That’s everything for this update, I’m probably going to start working on the rest of the power levels and make some fancy shooting patterns for when you reach 4 and 5

Build 8 can be found here!

And after that I decided to actually do some work on the game, I decided to do the interface before adding the scoring system since the interface consisted of a gray box on the right side of the screen.

I made the Interface a nice yellow, I added in a Score and High Score counter (doesn’t actually save your High Score at the moment), Made a Power counter/bar, for every 25 power your weapons get better. (0 is level 1, 25 is level 2 and 100 is level 5 (MAX)) It only goes up to 2 at the moment so it doesn’t change when you get to level 3 and beyond.

To test the score/power counter I added some scoring and power up items. Every enemy drops either a P(ower) item which increases your power by 2 or they drop a S(core) item which increases your score by 25. For every enemy you kill you get 100 points. This scoring system is in it’s really early stages since I haven’t implemented grazing or the combo system (Which I’m doing next)

Lastly I made some new sound effects to replace old ones and also for grabbing the power ups. Before I used some NES sound effects, but then I found DrPetter’s sfxr, which is a really awesome tool which randomly generates sound effects based on what you want.

Build 7 can be found here.

I’m probably PROBABLY going to start coding some on monday, get that score system up and running

DoDonPachi’s combo system give you extra points for every enemy you kill within a certain time frame from killing the last, so if you kill 10 enemies within 10 seconds you get a 10 combo, the higher the combo is the higher the point bonus is for every enemy.

Touhou’s  graze system is a mechanic that award you extra points for being a daredevil and grazing enemy bullets without touching them directly.

I’m not sure about the specifics, I don’t want to give too much point bonus for the combo system because then it will be all about keeping up your chain for the entire level which I don’t think should be a requirement to get a decent score, and I’m not sure at all about grazing, I’ll experiment with it when I start working on the game again.